


Triage

by orphan_account



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Character Death, Coping with Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Medical Trauma, Mental Anguish, Mental Breakdown, Mildly Dubious Consent, Molestation, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2018-01-01 00:22:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1038137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two patients come into your sickbay and both will die without immediate treatment. You can treat only one of them. One is a colleague; the other is your best friend. How do you deal with the decision that let your colleague die?</p><p>Stricken by guilt, Bones can't calm down enough to rest and prepare for the next surgery, so Spock does some emergency care of his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Triage

_Triage: It's ten hours into the battle on the ground and his staff are swamped with casualties beamed up from what has effectively become a front line to recover the crew of the away team that was captured by Orion slavers._

_They were stuck in the double jeopardy situation so frequently created by the Prime Directive; one stun blast to the slaver's encampment would do it, but the neighbouring towns of over two million pre-warp citizens would see everything._

_The only nurse not assisting or on the scene, Nurse Burke, and two Ensigns with level 2 first aid are treating yellow and green tags outside the doors for sickbay. All the beds they have, all forty, are occupied with yellow, red and two black tags._

_Bones is scrubbing up again after his third surgery of the afternoon, his twelfth hour on shift. There's no point trying for a break or attempting to assist or take over one of the other four surgeries currently taking place; he knows he'll be needed again within minutes. For now, he just sterilises the old-fashioned method, the little luxury-that-isn't of soap and water over sonic sterilisation processes._

_And he is, needed again. They don't call him to the transporter room, just rush both casualties in. They've already been tagged in the transporter room by the nurse there._

_Red._

_Two red tags._

_He looks over the first, Lieutenant Hannity. She's bleeding out, needs immediate care. Drifting in and out of consciousness. He almost starts treating her simply because she's the first one he sees, and once tagged it's equal priority._

_But then he sees the other patient, bleeding badly through a soaked field dressing, and even though the face is swollen and battered, he knows it's Jim. The nurse doing the tagging might not have known, but he knows. Jim's lost his shirts, his side looks like it's been split right open, blood running out like water._

_For a split second he is choked with indecision, and then he's already moving, floating Jim into an empty corner and peeling back the bandages. There's no nurse to assist him, no doctor to pick up the other patient. One of the ensigns doing first aid rushes in and takes Hannity. He sees her face crumple as she takes in the scope of her colleague's injury, as she pumps in twelve units of blood, tries to stop the bleeding with coagulants. It's useless, he would say if he had even a sliver of concentration to spare. Her internal injuries are too great, she'll never last without surgery. But he doesn't have time, and he watches as a helpless 19 year old communications Ensign loses her first patient, loses a friend and co-worker. Worse, worst of all, is Hannity's face in her last lucid moment, pure anguish. She looks at him, not angry, but understanding._

 

_Hannity is as good as dead, because he has chosen Jim. They all know it._

 

 

Eventually the battle is over. Ten dead; eleven of their hostages and forty-two other slaves recovered. Sixty-four wounded. It was a pyrrhic victory.

 

Another three hours of surgery on Jim and two hours on a badly burned Ensign from Security and Christine has finally deemed him too tired to stay on shift. There are easily another twenty surgeries to go, but he was told to take four hours out and come back after resting. He might be CMO, but he can't bring himself to disobey her, not right now.

He does not remember the journey from sickbay back to his quarters.

He showers, sonic, but he switches to water to cover up his own guilty tears from himself.

When he gets out, his throat is rasping and choked with an excess of watery saliva.

He lies down on the bed, damp hair uncomfortable and cooling quickly, and tosses and turns for forty minutes. He is shaking with internal conflict, miserable beyond tears. It's not the first time he's lost a patient, not the first time he's been elbows deep in Jim's gut, not even the first time he's done triage, marked someone with a black tag and dosed them with morphenolog to die.

It is the first time that he has chosen to condemn one of two equally urgent patients to death simply because he loves one more.

He doesn't register how hard he's crying until he's retching, until there's an acrid taste in his mouth and a solution of gastric acid and high-energy liquid food on the sheets. He scrambles out of the bed, snot and vomit running down his face and drags himself back to the bathroom for round two over the toilet.

He watches his face in the murky yellow-brown of the toilet bowl and flushes it down. Angry and guilty and thoroughly undeserving, he washes his face and brushes his teeth and drags his soiled pyjamas off and leaves them piled on his bathroom floor.

 

 

When he finally gets back to his bedroom, he's vaguely aware that he has only two hours and forty five minutes left to rest, which is in itself distressing; he's so far gone that the idea of having to operate terrifies him. What if he kills a patient?

Leonard's eyes are swollen and tired and gritty, ad he no longer has the will to get himself to the bed, so he simply sways in his bedroom until a head pokes around the divider from his living quarters.

 _Spock,_ he might have said, _what the hell are you doin' in my goddamn room without even askin'?_   But he doesn't even have the energy to comment.

“Nurse Chapel?” Spock's voice is clear when he crosses the room to the communication console and presses the button.

“ _Yes Mr. Spock?”_

“Please take note that Doctor McCoy will require an additional two hours' rest before attending to any patients, and reschedule treatments as necessary.”

Leonard expects protest – you can't just abandon the job because you need extra rest – but there is none. “ _Of course, Commander. All urgent patients have been treated for now and we only have yellows and greens left untreated. Tell him not to worry, I have it all under control. Let him know that the Captain and Lt Sulu are both stable and in recovery._ ”

Her confidence leaches some of the hopelessness out of Leonard's aching bones. Spock closes the communication and crosses into the bedroom.

Naked and vulnerable, McCoy retreats until his bare back hits the cold of the bulkhead, as though Spock might attack him, but when he reaches him and haules him up with Vulcan-strong hands, it is only to lead him back to the bed. His sheets have already been changed.

“Lie down,” Spock commands gently, like Leonard is _his_ patient.

Bones is confused but too tired to dwell on the fact that Spock is moving him about with a hand around his waist and another on his chest, the touch more familiar than it ought to be. They'd had their share of... Intimate interactions on prolonged missions and under dire circumstances, ranging from physical contact to confessions to yes, sex, but this is something quite different.

“No,” he says dumbly, but Spock understands.

He doesn't try to tell him not to feel guilty, that anyone would have done what he had done in his position, that the Captain's life _was_ the most valuable in terms of the running of the Enterprise, though God only knew the green blooded bastard wanted to. He just runs both hands around Leonard to hold him about the ribs and lower him over the bed.

McCoy is limp and lies where he's placed, but when Spock turns to leave his arm shoots out to grip the other man's wrist and he repeats, “No.”

There is the sound of Spock's boots coming off, and then the other man sliding into the bed beside him, dressed and warm where Leonard is naked and cold.

The sound McCoy makes might have come from any mammal and meant the same thing, a keening, quietish wail that startles him more than it does Spock.

He's crying harder than before, angry, hot, resentful tears and choked, noisy sobs, fingers white-knuckled leaving bruises on Spock's forearms through his uniform. He's beyond the ability to vocalise the emotions, to communicate the responsibility he feels, that in her last waking moment, Hannity had died knowing she was second best. Knowing he had chosen Jim's life over hers. _  
_

Spock's hand rubs circles on his chest, his face bizarrely but typically blank when Bones looks at it, trying to assess his intentions. The circles travel lower by increments, down past his ribs, past his navel, until Spock rubs over his cock gently.

Leonard stares at Spock's face as his flaccid length is played with, tenderly and with no apparent goal in mind. Spock meets his gaze without a hint of challenge or predation in his eye. Quite uncharacteristically, he says, “Do not over-think it, Doctor. Sleep.”

The touches aren't getting him off, but they aren't unpleasant either. They're... relaxing, distracting. The harsh sobs die down into softer noises and McCoy angles himself so that his head is on Spock's chest – trapping him there for his four remaining hours of rest – and Spock's hand is caught between them, continuing its mindless ministrations. It isn't love or any form of lust, just affection and comfort, but Bones will take what he can get right now. He's never been touched so casually and so intimately before, and he muses on the edge of consciousness and a semi that he might never be touched like that again.

Despite the surreality of what's going on, the familiar smell of Spock and the unfamiliar buzz of his heartbeat beneath McCoy's palm, the order to sleep proves surprisingly easy to obey. He passes out before he can determine whether Spock's hand job is going to come to fruition or not; it really doesn't matter.

 

  
When he wakes up at his alarm, signalling 15 minutes before his next shift, Spock picks out his clothes and drags them onto his dazed form. Breakfast is placed in front of him alongside a prepared hypo of stimulants.

Peculiarly, Spock stays for breakfast, or rather for the five minutes in which there is a time to sit at the table and stuff McCoy with replicated "eggs".

 

He wonders for a long time afterwards if perhaps the thing between him and Spock _was_ love, or perhaps if it was something stronger and fiercer and more terrifying. _Do not over-think it._

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you thought of this! (And to cast a vote, do you think what Spock does is creepy or not?)


End file.
